In the last post, we saw SCARF model proposed by David Rock, identifying five strong human motivations (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness & Fairness). The last post also discussed Status. In this post, we will discuss the Fairness, or morality.
The most important paradigm shift on morality is this:
Fairness and other morals are hard coded in our genes!
The conventional belief is that the moralities have been given to us by religions. But the more we understand how humans and other animals work, the more it becomes clear that
Religions have simply documented the moral values that we have inherited through our genes.
Unfortunately, religions have done a poor job of documenting morality. Given that most of the religious teachings are hundreds or thousands of years old, they suffer from two disadvantages:
- The clarity of thought applied (while documenting the moral values) in the distant is substantially poor when compared with today’s rigorous standards
- The power of today’s science and mathematics to segregate the nuts and bolts of morality was not available in the past. For the ancient thinkers, morality was too large to grasp, too dynamic to pin down and contained too many black boxes to make sense of.
Here is a wonderful TED video that shows morals are hard coded in the genes: Do Animals have Morals? (17 min). The capuchin monkeys shown at 13 minute mark in the video have a brain that weighs about just 3.5% of a human brain! Still, they clearly understand what is fair. Understanding of fairness has been observed even in small fishes with pinhead sized brain, or in insects with no central nervous system. If we know how to look, morality is seen in every animal.
Here is why the genetic origin of morality shouldn’t be surprising:
Proteins come together to form genes. Genes, to chromosomes. Chromosomes to organs to an organism. Individual organisms come together to form a society/colony.
Each of these collectives has their own set of rules that must be preserved across time and generations. Else, the process of formation of collectives stop from happening.
Chemical and physical rules govern the coagulation of organs into an organism (or upstream). Morality is the rules that govern as to how individual organisms come together to form a colony/society.
Without morality, we will have no societies. Because, morality is the fabric that holds us all together into a society. The fabric of the society.
This idea has a few very interesting implications:
- Since we don’t find many humans wanting to live in isolation for extended period of time, we can speculate that our ancestors who didn’t crave for fairness perished. For today’s humans, fairness is a basic necessity. Perceived lack of fairness and morality in other people can make us do funny things.
- Since fairness is built into our genes, we should expect the world to become a more just place to live with time.
- Morality is a component of the society. Moral values usually give more importance to the society, than the benefit of an individual.
- All agents of morality (including the religions) will mostly put the benefit of the society above the benefit of an individual.
- We don’t need the religious teachings to tell us what is right and what is not.
- Because of the poor standards of thinking of understanding involved in the religious teachings, we will be much better off if we replace the religious teachings with scientific understanding of moral values.